These days fashion inspiration can be conjured at the click of a hashtag, and yet you’ll be hard-pressed to find the things that influence Grace Wales Bonner trending on Tumblr. The young British menswear designer is unpacking some of the cultural references that guide her clothes with a new, limited-edition zine that’s launching at the Frieze London art fair. Collaging together photos and texts, the result is printed proof of just how deep she’s gone for the sake of fashion: Take the cover, a riff on an old Nollywood [Nigeria’s answer to Bollywood] DVD she found practically left for dead in Ghana. “They didn’t want to sell them to me because they weren’t new—the DVDs had been out in the sun for ages,” she says. “But that’s exactly why I liked them.”

For Bonner, the mood board is often the message. She used to work in the library of fashion college Central Saint Martins, and she travels the world (she’s been to India, Senegal, and Ghana recently), unearthing old books and rare imagery, then combining those references—Langston Hughes, the paintings of Léon Bonnat, Paris Is Burning—for clothes that are refined by old-world sensibilities, but refreshingly modern at the same time. A crystal chandelier headband might sit on the head of a male model wearing a Chanel-like suit jacket and trousers so loose they read like an elevated take on track pants. “It’s not just books—printed ephemera, a gin packet, DVDs, teaching materials. It’s really broad. And I try and treat everything the same way,” she says of her high-low, East-meets-West aesthetic. “The same way I’d treat a piece of poetry, I’d treat something I’d find in the market. Giving them a place to exist in the same space.”

Featuring original collages of photographs of Malick Sidibé, images of 18th-century maharaja palaces, and landscapes in India collected from West African markets, the new zine is right in sync with her most recent collection, Malik, which was shown in London this past July. With regal jackets and scarves, Bonner was exploring the cultural overlap between India and Africa fostered by the slave trade and, in particular, the story of Malik Ambar, a 16th-century Ethiopian man who rose from enslavement to the halls of the Indian parliament. Her work generally probes issues of race and gender—the ideas are often political, the silhouettes as feminine as they are princely, the models mostly black—and the zine weaves together prose and poetry written by African-American intellectuals such as James Baldwin and Richard Wright. “I’m not an academic. But I’m interested in post-colonialism in academia,” she says. “I don’t want to put forward any ideas, as in saying something’s the right or wrong way to think. But I’m not afraid. It’s natural and comfortable for me to talk about these things. The slave trade is a way of explaining the connections between Africa and India. It’s there, it’s unavoidable, and I’m just showing it in a different way.”

Made in collaboration with art director Jamie Reid, the zine explores what she describes as “the rhythm of black love,” a sort of rare printed journal that you can imagine someone in the future uncovering and falling for, with its sepia-toned images and free-form poetry. “We tried to make the most elevated zine you could possibly make. The paper is really beautiful, we’ve used bronze embossing and Riso printing,” she says. “But it’s stapled—it is still a zine. It’s an easy way of communicating that’s accessible to me as a young designer. Without much money, I can still get ideas out there.” There will be a performance at the Frieze show this Saturday to accompany the release, though she can’t tell me much about it yet. What she will say is that making art is as fun as making fashion. “It’s exciting to do it in an art gallery because it gives me license to do things for the sake of doing them, as opposed to thinking of the commercial relevance,” she says. “It’s about creating an exciting moment. A space to think about something.”